Re: RDF: a suitable NLP KB representation (Was: Owning URIs (Was: Yet Another LOD cloud browser))

Hi Sherman --

You may be interested in the system online at the site below.

In particular, the approach in the example

   www.reengineeringllc.com/demo_agents/RDFQueryLangComparison1.agent

may be useful.

Apologies if you have seen this before, and thanks for comments.

                                                    -- Adrian

Internet Business Logic
A Wiki and SOA Endpoint for Executable Open Vocabulary English over SQL and
RDF
Online at www.reengineeringllc.com    Shared use is free

Adrian Walker
Reengineering
Phone: USA 860 830 2085

On Tue, May 19, 2009 at 4:32 PM, Sherman Monroe <sdmonroe@gmail.com> wrote:

> David said:
>
>
>> I didn't quite express myself clearly. If you were to take the previous
>> sentence ("I didn't quite express myself clearly"), and encode it in RDF,
>> what would you get? It certainly is something that I said about "the thing",
>> the thing being vaguely what I tried to explain before (how do you mint a
>> URI for that?). The point is that using RDF or whatever other non-natural
>> language structured data representation, you cannot practically represent
>> "the things people say about the thing" in the majority of real-life cases.
>> You can only express a very tiny subset of what can be said in natural
>> language.
>
>
> First off: I began as a NLP researcher seeking the holiest of holy-grails,
> a method and accompaning knowledge representation formalism with enough
> semantic rigor to encapsulate any NL statements or expression. What came out
> of that work was the Cypher transcoder <http://cypher.monrai.com>. When I
> was first intro'd to the RDF (circa 1999), and when I saw the triple format,
> it reminded me of predicate calculus (which in my opinion failed the above
> criteria), and so I turned my noise up at it (and called TimBL a *lunatic*if I recall), and decided to just work on the NL processing side (i.e.
> extracting semantics from NL phrase structure) and shelf the knowledge
> representation side 'til later (i.e. how to serialize the semantics once
> extracted). Then four years or so later (circa 2003), I made enough headway
> on the input processing side to turn attention again to the output/knowledge
> representation side. That's when I was turned on to Frame Semantics, which I
> immediately praised, it is by far the most expressive and elegant knowledge
> representation framework for NL I have come across (although, it's been 3 or
> 4 years since I really looked). In short, frame semantics sees all sentences
> as a "scene" (like a movie scene) and the nouns all play "roles" in that
> scene. E.g. a boy eating is involved in a ConsumeFood scene, and the actors
> are the boy, the utensil he uses, the food, the chair he sits in. So I
> choose framesemantics as the KB model for Cypher grammar parser output.
>
> This sent off lightbulbs for me, I went back to RDF, and saw that, low and
> behold, frames can be represented as RDF, the scene types being classes, a
> scene instance (i.e. the thing representing a complete sentence) being the
> subject, the property is the role, and the object is the thing playing that
> role, e.g:
>
> EatFrame023  rdf:type  mlo:EatFrame
> EatFrame023  mlo:eater  someschema:URIForJohn
> EatFrame023  utensil  someschema:JohnFavoriteSpoon
> EatFrame023  mlo:seatedAt  _:anonChair
> EatFrame023  foaf:location  someschema:JohnsLivingRoom
> EatFrame023  someschema:time  _:01122
> EatFrame023  truthval  "false"^booleanValueType
>
> dbpedia:Heroes(Series) rdf:type dbpedia:TVShow
> dbpedia:Heroes(Series) dbpedia:showtime _:01122
>
> _:01122 rdf:type types:TimeSpan
> _:01122 types:startHour "20"^num:PositiveInteger
> _:01122 types:startMinutes "00"^num:PositiveInteger
> _:01122 types:endHour "21"^num:PositiveInteger
> _:01122 types:endMinutes "00"^num:PositiveInteger
> _:01122 types:timezone "EST"
>
> This says: *No, John didn't eat in a sandwich in a chair in his living
> room using his favorite spoon, during the TV show Heroes*. Do you still
> believe RDF is incapable of expressing complex NL statements?
>
> Second off: Even though RDF (when married with frame semantics) is capable
> of expressing very complex NL sentences, it was never the intention of the
> Semantic Web forerunners to create a framework for doing so, and I do not
> believe that this capacity is nessassary to make RDF valuable. The question
> RDF answers is fundamentally: *What happens if all the worlds databases
> (e.g. Oracle, Mysql, etc databases out there) could be directly connected to
> one another in a large global network, all sharing one massive, distributed
> schema, and people were able to send queries to that network using a
> Esperanto for SQL?* The ability of RDF to represent (not sentences but)
> rows and columns of any database schema imaginable means it can deliver this
> vision, and the value tied to it.
>
>
>
>> This affects how people conceptualize and use this medium. If I hear a URI
>> on TV, would I be motivated enough to type it into some browser when what I
>> get back looks like an engineering spec sheet, but worse--with different
>> rows from different sources, forcing me to derive the big picture myself,
>>   urn:sdajfdadjfai324829083742983:sherman_monroe
>>      name: Sherman Monroe (according to foo.com)
>>      age: __ (according to bar.com)
>>      age: ___ (according to bar2.com)
>>      nationality: __ (according to baz.com)
>>      ...
>> rather than, say, a natural language essay that conveys a coherent
>> opinion, or a funny video?
>>
>
>
> Then it seems you're still not a convert :) As for me, your example here
> has very obvious value. Remember what WWW did for humans and the huge
> revolution that came with giving people access to what other people in the
> world were saying no matter where in the world they were, and no matter what
> langauge the host machine spoke natively. The SW is doing that all over
> again... but for machines this time.
>
> User empowerment is a large external benefit of the SW, in WWW, webmaster
> makes assumptions (sometimes rightly, sometimes wrongly) about what data is
> important and should be shown and how, in SW, user decides for his/herself.
> Additionally, NL will play a big part of cleaning up the UI so that it
> doesn't look like an enginerring schematic :) Again, I reference razorbase<http://www.razorbase.com>.
> Notice the descriptions in the breadcrumbs and descriptions of facets under
> the 'Your query' link.
>
>  -sherman
>
>